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In the race between Beard and Head, it seems to be a tie.
It’s been 30 days (not quite a month) since I shaved it all bare for my Ghandi Halloween costume, and I decided to make a race of it. Life is one big experiment for me, and sometimes my follicles get involved.
So the […]

I do. It makes me very happy. I have yet to not ride it to work this Fall (since I got back from Maine in August). That makes me a green commuter. I haven’t even had to take the bus — not even on the rainy or cold days. I’d be lying if I said […]

Yellow and blue Hokey Spokes! or red (your only choice) FX Flare
How cool are these? And tremendous Geek factor! And if I program them to say “Don’t hit me!” maybe it’ll keep the cars away?

Jen Koberstein got me a pair when she went to New Zealand, and they were perfect gloves in all but the coldest biking weather, at which point I’d wear them as liners under the Trek shell lobster gloves I have. Alas, one day one of them developed a hole.
Short of heading to New Zealand (or […]

More bike safety stuff, but also super-cool for camping gear that might otherwise get lost at a dark campsite. The super-bright stuff is at SafetyCentral for $5.99, but if you can find another source of Scotchlite tape, that’d be fine. Also fine is the yellow tape or decals at reflectivedecals.com. I’d like to get enough […]

Why this particular one? Well, because of the ledge — you can see it on the left side of the picture. It keeps the papers from sliding around on the board better than the clip itself can. I had the earlier “corner clip” version before) of the clipboard for a few years until the University […]

Craftsman 12-in-1 Screwdriver, Magic Precision® I need a precision screwdriver set — but instead of one of those sets in the plastic cases that break, I thought I’d try to find an all-in-one type that stores its bits in the handle. This looks like it’ll do — and it’s a Craftsman, so it ought to […]

Finished my prelims on Tuesday. I feel pretty good about them. At some point, I’ll get around to formatting and posting them on my Learn site, but until then I’m doing a little test — and I don’t recommend it.
The first question can be found, in its unformatted glory (meaning I merely copied it from […]

Conceptualizing Space and Place in Learning through Augmented Reality Games
(Part one of a two-part doctoral preliminary examination by John Martin, November 22, 2005)
Part I. Concepts of Space and Place in Learning

Introduction: Why this is important
Space and Place, and Paradigms
Space, Place, and Learning
Virtual and Augmented Space and Place
Learning with Games
Conclusion of Space and Place in Learning

Overview […]

Part II. Designing Games for Place: The value of playing and designing ARGs
(part 2 of a two-part doctoral preliminary examination by John Martin, November 21, 2005)
1. Introduction: Why this is important

2. The value of ARGs in learning
2.1. Learning by playing ARGs
2.2. The introduction of design
2.3. Learning by designing ARGs
3. Designing ARGs for Place
3.1. Place in […]

Part III. References for Part I
Apple, M. (1990). Ideology and curriculum (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Basso, K. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: landscape and language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge.
Brosterman, N. (1997). Inventing kindergarten. New York: Harry N. Adams Inc.
Brown, […]

From the department of “How Cool is this?”
An innovative knitter by the name of Amy O’Neill Houck has pulled off the brilliant. I wish I knew how, and had time to, knit. Of course there are (or rather “is a pseudo-”) commercial alternatives mentioned in my last entry, but commercial alternatives generally lack the love […]

17 degrees out with a windchill of 7 degrees. Last night it was colder and dark and sleety-snow was pounding my face when I biked home. I am happy that I live less than 3 miles from my office.
Still, it was cold. And my ears hurt, even with a stretchy poly balaclava type thing on […]

Nineteen pages of the first question’s response are pretty well finalized, and I’m on my final section (not counting the Conclusion). In the next day or so I think I’ll post it here in order to open it up to anyone who might want to comment and point out weaknesses. Realistically, no one will. […]

prelims: universal abbreviation for the preliminary pages of a book before the start of the main text, often numbered in roman numerals.
preliminary examination, preliminary exam, prelim (an examination taken by graduate students to determine their fitness to continue)
Here I am, writing away on my prelims, and I’m noticing that it’s an interesting journey of spurts […]

The long fingers of the government reach further than I’d previously thought! In their study “On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets,” Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter find that:
Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy […]

The State Journal Weighs In (A little late?)
http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/index.php?ntid=60881&ntpid=3
Another Perusek-based article from 2003

http://burr.kent.edu/archives/2003/spring/stories/t_isolatedcell.html

Chapter 2 of Dewey’s (1900) School and Society that Mingfong referred to is available online here.
I found the Dewey article “The School and the Life of the Child” extremely worthy of reading and thinking if we want to claim that we need to extend learning from classroom to a broader, richer context outside of […]

The ingredients are swirling around out there. Take the rise of services like this:
Mologogo is a free service that will track a “friends” GPS enabled cell phone from another phone or on the web. Mologogo also serves as a dirt-cheap tracking system, so go ahead and fauxjack something.
Add to that the increase of web-enabled Smart […]

Semapedia.org is working on their version of a “Physical Wikiedia” — much like the location-based one we were discussing. However, instead of using GPS to bring up entries, they rely on Semapedia Taggers to annotate locations, and 2D bar-codes physically
Our goal is to connect the virtual world with the physical world by bringing the best […]